Before there was "Glee "or "American Idol, "there was Stagedoor Manor, a theater camp in the Catskills where big-time Hollywood casting directors came to find the next generation of stars. It's where Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Zach Braff, Mandy Moore, Lea Michele, and many others got their start as kids. At age thirty-one, Mickey Rapkin, a senior editor at "GQ "and self-proclaimed theater geek, was lucky enough to go, too, when he followed three determined teen actors through the rivalries, heartbreak, and triumphs of a summer at Stagedoor Manor.
Every summer since 1975, a new crop of campers has entered Stagedoor Manor to begin an intense, often wrenching introduction to professional theater. The offspring of Hollywood players like Ron Howard, Nora Ephron, and Bruce Willis work alongside kids on scholarship. Some campers have agents, others are just beginning. The faculty--all seasoned professionals--demand adult-size dedication and performances from the kids. Add in talent scouts from Disney and Paradigm and you have an intense, exciting environment where some thrive and others fail. Eye-opening, funny, and full of drama and heart, "Theater Geek "offers an illuminating romp through the world of serious child actors.

Offering one of the first scholarly examinations of digital and distanced performance since the global shutdown of theaters in March 2020, Barbara Fuchs provides both a record of the changes and a framework for thinking through theater's transformation. Though born of necessity, recent productions offer a new world of practice, from multi-platform plays on Zoom, WhatsApp, and Instagram, to enhancement via filters and augmented reality, to urban distanced theater that enlivens streetscapes and building courtyards. Based largely outside the commercial theater, these productions transcend geographic and financial barriers to access new audiences, while offering a lifeline to artists. This study charts how virtual theater puts pressure on existing assumptions and definitions, transforming the conditions of both theater-making and viewership. How are participatory, site-specific, or devised theater altered under physical-distancing requirements? How do digital productions blur the line between film and theater? What does liveness mean in a time of pandemic? In its seven chapters, Theater of Lockdown focuses on digital and distanced productions from the Americas, Europe, and Australia, offering scholarly analysis and interviews. Productions examined include Theater in Quarantine's "closet work" in New York; Forced Entertainment's (Sheffield, UK), End Meeting for All, I, II, and III; the work of Madrid-based company Grumelot; and the virtuosic showmanship of EFE Tres in Mexico City.

When Hammer Productions was formed in the 1920s, no one foresaw the impact this small, independent studio would have on the international film market. Christopher Lee's mesmerizing, animalistic, yet gentlemanly performance as Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Mummy were celebrated worldwide, and the Byronic qualities of Peter Cushing's Dr. Frankenstein, among his many other Hammer characters, proved impossible to forget. Hammer maintained consistant period settings, creating a timeless and enchanting aesthetic. "Studying Hammer Horror" treats Hammer as a quintessentially British product and through a study of its work investigates larger conceptions of national horror cinemas. The book examines genre, auteur theory, stardom, and representation within case studies of "Curse of Frankenstein" (1957), "Twins of Evil" (1971), and Hammer's latest film, "Beyond the Rave" (2008), and weighs Hammer's impact on the British film industry, past and present. Intended for students, fans, and general readers, this book transcends superficial preconceptions of Hammer horror in order to reach the essence of Hammer.

You had to decide to let yourself be turned upside down, you had to accept to see the idea you had forged about yourself progressively shatter. In the summer of 1969, at 19 years old, Didier Mouturat gave up on college, shattering his parents hopes that he follow a safe and conventional course. Fresh from the wild Parisian student revolt of 1968, with its street battles and slogans, he set out to find a life that would be truly alive, deciding to be a classical actor. When he met Cyrille Dives, however, the universe of masks quietly turned his world upside down. This book describes Mouturats apprenticeship to a unique theater artist. In the 1970s and early 80s, Dives created a theater of masks, a Western parallel to Japanese Noh. Dives was a true bohemian artist, a sculptor of masks, a painter and theatrical director. Cyrille Dives was also a spiritual master. Mouturats apprenticeship encompassed everything from walking in a way that brings a mask to life to cultivating a beginners mind. Slowly and subtly, the theater apprenticeship became an encounter with the deeper truth of his own being. I am speaking of an intimate, progressive discovery that we are not masters of our own being that it is only the result of a system of reactions that tyrannize us. Mouturat becomes Divess right-hand man, helping establish a theater and a school of masks. That work is evident here in enchanting illustrations, as well as words. Yet as translated by the scholar and author Roger Lipsey, Mouturat also offers a pithy chronicle of a search for meaning and inner being.